RESEARCHERS DISPUTE EZRA POUND'S 'INSANITY'

By HERBERT MITGANG

Published: October 31, 1981

A historian and a psychiatrist, acting independently, have taken a new view of the circumstances that led to Ezra Pound's hospital confinement rather than trial for treason after World War II.

Pound, the American poet who broadcast for Fascist Italy during the war and then was kept in comfortable circumstances in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington from 1946 to 1958 -supposedly because he was ''insane'' - actually was rational enough to be tried for treason, according to Stanley Kutler, Professor of American Institutions at the University of Wisconsin.

Pound himself chose to be regarded as irrational, and put on a good ''act'' for psychiatrists so that he would not be imprisoned, the historian said. Professor Kutler said that Pound, whom he described as an American Fascist, anti-Semite and traitor - with the help of a sympathetic hospital superintendent at St. Elizabeth's - ''fooled'' Government officials who wanted to prosecute him for aiding the enemy in wartime.

Psychology Today Article

This new appraisal of the Pound case, based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Professsor Kutler, will appear in greater detail in a forthcoming book, tentatively titled ''Political Justice in the Cold War Period,'' due from Hill & Wang in the fall of 1982.

Similar assertions appear in the November issue of Psychology Today in an article called ''The Protection of Ezra Pound,'' by E. Fuller Torrey, a contributing editor of the magazine and a clinical and research psychiatrist at St. Elizabeth's. He also saw documents under the Freedom of Information Act, spoke to other psychiatrists at the hospital and will publish his findings in a book he is completing, ''The Roots of Treason: A Psychobiography of Ezra Pound.''

Professor Kutler, in an interview from Madison, Wis., said, ''I was given access to military intelligence and military government documents, hospital records, Justice, F.B.I. and State Department records over the last three years - something that would not be possible today with the new limitations. These documents reveal that all the doctors who examinated him considered him sane.

''He was eccentric, egocentric, but that didn't mean he was insane. The judgment of the doctors was that he had personality-trait disturbance and a narcissistic personality - but that is not a psychiatric judgment. Nobody ever actually said he was insane. He himself chose to plead that way. To the very end, when he was allowed to return to Italy - giving the Fascist salute again there and declaring, 'All America is an insane asylum' - he wanted the indictment dropped.'' Pound's Hospital Privileges

Professor Kutler added that Pound was allowed to get away with his ''act'' because of two factors. First, Dr. Winfred Overholser Sr., the hospital superintendent, who died in 1964, protected Pound from criminal justice and allowed him to have privileges - including after-hours visitors for sexual liaisons - because he was fascinated by the poet as a cultural figure. Second, the ''Pound Establishment'' - various literary figures who respected him for his poetry - aroused sympathy in his behalf.

Dr. Torrey makes similar judgments in Pyschology Today: ''The Pound case is one of the earliest and most flagrant examples of the ongoing abuse of psychiatry in the American criminal-justice system. For it seems clear that one man, Dr. Overholser, decided that Pound should not stand trial for treason and then singlehandedly engineered the testimony that led to his hospital confinement. Overholser believed that Pound was a gret American poet who, although he had made 'mistakes,' should not have to face the risk of execution.''